Recent Cookbooks on My Shelf - December 2024

There's always room for more cookbooks - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath!

For the second instalment of Extra Food Chat with Kath for 2025, I’m sharing some reviews of cookbooks that were added to my collection last month. A few were gifts as both my birthday and Christmas fall in December, and others were books I was either eager to buy or stumbled across in a bookshop.

Hopefully our things that have been in storage for a year are coming out soon, so I will be able to get all my cookbooks back and onto their shelves (and work out how new titles I’ve acquired will actually fit onto said shelves!).

There are quite a few new releases I am very excited about in 2025, so the first two free Friday Food Chat with Kath newsletters will be filled with the best of 2024, and what to look forward to next. The free newsletter will be back on Friday February 7th, so more cookbook chat isn’t far away!

This post is a bit long, so you may need to click through at the prompt if you are viewing view email to read the entire thing. On to the reviews!

Taboon: Sweet and Savoury Delights from the Lebanese Bakery by Hisham Assaad (Smith Street Books) - I am always interested in books about baking and sweets (as many of the books on this list indicate!), but cookbooks such as Taboon that showcase baked goods from a part of the world I don’t know too much about in terms of baking, and generously share the stories of people and places are always high on my to buy list. Taboon is emotive and generous, and author Hisham not only shares recipes, but his and his families story as Palestinian’s living in Lebanon since Al Nakba of 1948. Taboon is infused with baked goods popular in Lebanon, but also those found in the refugee camps housing those displaced from Palestine like Hisham’s family.

Food is such a large part of a communities culture, and while this book feels generous, it also feels necessary. Like it has been written and created with some urgency. Not that it has been rushed, but that the threats to Lebanese and Palestinian people, land and culture, make books like these necessary to write it all down, remember things that could be lost, and share them with the world. In addition to the emotive writing from Hisham, the photography, both food and location based is beautiful, and really adds to the generous and personal nature Taboon has. In terms of recipes, there are a few recipes in bread chapter I’d especially like to try, notably the Ka’ak Al-Qods (Jerusalem Sesame Bagels p.38), Ma’arouk (Sweet Stuffed Brioche p.42) and Manouchet Za’atar (Za’atar Topped Breads p.46).

The Irish Bakery by Andrew Montgomery and Cherie Denham (Montgomery Press) - A book that has been on my wish list for a while, and now finally, the wait is over! This book is as gorgeous as social media makes it out to be. It’s also generous in terms of its size and page number, which is nice considering it is an expensive book to buy here in Australia. The photography by Andrew Montgomery is really stunning and inviting, and even reading it in the height of Summer transports to me a cooler, greener and probably more overcast part of the world instantly.

The combination of photography, recipes and book design really work together to tell a story and transport the reader to a cosy kitchen in Northern Ireland. Recipes are a combination of those you would expect from an Irish baking book like soda bread (p.46), and then heirloom recipes maybe less widely known in other parts of the world such as Cherie’s aunts Cranberry and Apricot Lace Biscuits (p.160). The recipes span from breads, scones and biscuits, teatime treats, sweet and savoury pies, cakes and pudding so there are quite a variety of recipes in this book, with the majority being sweet however some savoury can be found especially in the Tarts and Pies chapter. This is a wonderful book just to spend some time and read through, enjoy the photography and start making a list of the recipes you want to try. This book is a triumph of collaboration and independent publishing, any bookshop not stocking this book is missing out.

Baking Beyond the Paywall: My reviews of Crumbs, Nature’s Candy and The Lost Recipes are below for paid subscribers.

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